Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the ratio of emergency calls originating from portable telephones to the entire emergency calls. Particularly, in Japan, the majority of calls to the police (110) are made from portable telephones. While a system is already established in the fixed telephone services to identify the address of the caller, no system for identifying the position of the portable telephone caller has yet been established.
Swift identification of the position of the caller is extremely important for the quick and reliable handling of an emergency call while it is being made. This calls for the realization, as soon as possible, of a system to enable notification of position information about the caller making an emergency call on a portable telephone. Making the caller enter his or her own position information might hinder the swift handling of an emergency. Thus, there is a need to provide easily services closely related with an individual without requiring the entry of position information or individual/client information by the user.
A technology has been disclosed in which, for example, should a user fall ill or encounter a crime or a disaster, his or her portable terminal device is connected via the Internet to an emergency call server, which is notified of the nature of the emergency call (sickness, accident, crime, etc.). At the same time, the user's individual/client information, such as his or her position information, contact information, insurance number, and so on, is transmitted to the emergency call server. The emergency call server identifies the user's current position based on the acquired position information, and notifies the hospital or police so that an ambulance or a police car can be dispatched. Furthermore, based on the individual/client information, the client's house or company, for example, noted in the contact information is simultaneously notified of the name of the admitting hospital, the condition of the patient, or the like. In addition, the user's past medical history is obtained with reference to the individual/client information, and the hospital is notified of it so that an optimum treatment can be administered (see Patent Document 1, for example).
In another technology, the position of a caller can be identified on a base-station-area basis upon an emergency call from a portable phone, even when the caller does not have a correct understanding of his or her current location, or when the call is suddenly terminated upon the user's entry into an area with bad reception. In this technology, upon detection of an emergency call number, a control station equipment transmits the registered position information that the wireless mobile station provides when moving from the current base station zone into another base station zone, on a communications channel as additional data. In an emergency call receiving device, the position information is stored in a memory unit and used for the identification of the service provider via which the call was made. Map information associated with each of the base station areas, which are determined by each service provider, is stored, and a detailed position can be retrieved by entering surrounding building information, which is managed with a database. The search result is then displayed (see Patent Document 2, for example).
Patent Document 1: JP Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2002-49684 A
Patent Document 2: JP Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 11-234727 A